Reference no: EM133096372
Exercise - Big Data and Analytics
Discussion Question:
1. Why Big Data analytics is important?
2. Discuss some of the main data sources for Big Data.
3. Discuss some of the drivers and enablers of Big Data.
4. Discuss Hadoop/MapReduce and its relevance for Big Data.
5. What are the some of the main technologies for Big Data and analytic.
Task 2 Case Study :
Getting Started with Big Data- Case Study
Nicole Mercer is the BI director for Everything Rugs, which manufactures and sells indoor and outdoor rugs to big box and specialty stores. Most of her team's efforts are on descriptive analytics-running queries, reports, dashboards, and special analyses. The team also supports an enterprise BI tool that allows users to create their own reports and dashboards. The data infrastructure is provided by an enterprise data warehouse and dependent data marts for manufac¬turing, finance, and sales and marketing. All in all, it's a fairly vanilla BI environment.
Nicole is sensing an interest in big data. Senior management has mentioned it. Marketing is talking about sentiment analysis and viral marketing. Although Nicole has been following big data (it is impossible to miss) and her data warehousing vendor has big data platforms, she has many questions. Can you help her with some of them?
1. Her intuition is to start with a small project. Is this the best approach? What are the characteristics of a good starting project? Is there a specific project you would recommend?
2. Any new project will have to go through Everything Rugs' usual corporate approval process. In fact, the platforms her data warehousing vendor offers would require special funding. Is there anything unique about big data projects that Nicole should be aware of to get funding for the project? How should she work with management and the vendor to secure approval?
3. Nicole has developed a well-controlled, centralized data infrastructure. When she was hired, she was able to eliminate most of the independent data marts. She senses that with big data and more platforms, her infra¬structure is going to get messier. She is concerned that she may not fully control the new platforms unless she moves fast or in concert with the business units. Is this a common and reasonable concern? What advice do you have for Nicole?
4. Nicole has been reading about Hadoop as a low-cost approach to storing and analyzing big data. Although the Hadoop software (and the Hadoop ecosystem) is free, she knows that making it work together would require considerable effort and possibly outside help. What advice do you have to help Nicole evaluate this alternative?
5. Recently, Nicole heard a speaker mention that more firms are using Hadoop as the platform for processing data from all sources, even structured data currently stored in the data warehouse. The structured data would be processed in Hadoop and then stored in the warehouse. Does this make sense for structured data? What are the ben¬efits and drawbacks of this approach?